When I was in my early 20’s, I hustled my ass off. I worked 2 jobs and a side hustle. I drank 8 cups of coffee a day and popped No Doz pills to work at night.
And then I burned the fuck out. And crashed hard.
And it wasn’t worth it.
There’s a lot of folks who will tell you: “grind to the point of exhaustion. Chase wealth and rest later. Make work your only religion.”
That advice is poison. It will leave you broken and hurt and tired and alone.
In 1677, Spinoza identified greed and ambition as forms of insanity that were perceived as only annoying and contemptible. Erich Fromm notes how by 1955 they've lost even that mildly negative tinge. He calls these "socially patterned defects" "the pathology of normalcy".
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1944/neurosis.htm
"The individual shares it with many others; he is not aware of it as a defect, and his security is not threatened by the experience of being different[.] What he may have lost in richness and in a genuine feeling of happiness is made up by the security of fitting in with the rest of mankind – as he knows them. As a matter of fact, his very defect may have been raised to a virtue by his culture and thus give him an enhanced feeling of achievement."
JA Westenberg
Gssy
culpaplex